Donna started to rise, but Carl stopped her by placing a hand on her arm. “We’ll be up in a minute,” he said. “I’d like just one more cup of coffee first.”
Donna seemed about to speak, but a look from her husband made her bite her lip and sit quietly instead, as Jackson and Laurel walked away.
“You always accuse me of imagining that your mother disapproves of me,” Laurel couldn’t help saying as soon as she and Jackson were alone in the elevator going up to the surgery waiting room. “Are you going to tell me she wasn’t making a few digs at me just then?”
His first instinct was obviously to defend his mother. But even as he started to speak, he fell silent and shook his head. “I don’t know what’s going on with Mom today,” he admitted. “She did seem to be taking her anxiety out on you, and that wasn’t fair. I apologize if she hurt your feelings.”
“Why would you apologize?” That was just the sort of thing that annoyed Laurel. “You don’t control what your mother says or does. And at least you defended me this time.”
“This time? Implying that I don’t usually—” He stopped and drew a deep breath. “Never mind.”
She supposed he was trying to stick to their agreement not to quarrel today, and she reminded herself that she should do the same. Just as Jackson shouldn’t have to apologize for his mother’s behavior, he shouldn’t have to take the blame, either.
“I’m not trying to imply anything,” she told him quietly. “Just…thank you for standing up for me.”
“We’re a team, remember?”
Laurel couldn’t help wondering which team he would choose if Donna’s newly revealed hostility toward her daughter-in-law escalated into real competition.
Seeing Tyler for the first time after surgery was difficult for all of them. Laurel had to lock her knees to keep from sagging against Jackson at the first sight of her baby with needles in his arms and a plastic tube down his throat.
Jackson made a rough sound low in his chest. Donna gasped, then burst into tears. Laurel tried to be annoyed at her mother-in-law’s melodramatic reaction, but she was trying too hard to hold back the tears herself.
The PICU staff had been lenient in allowing all four of them to enter Tyler’s unit, and they permitted them to stay for a short while, but then they insisted that only two could remain. Space was limited, and the staff needed plenty of room to monitor and care for their patient.
Carl convinced Donna to let him take her home to rest, leaving Jackson and Laurel to sit by their son’s bed. Donna made them promise to call if there was any change at all in the child’s condition. She didn’t look at Laurel as she left, and Laurel wondered if she had done anything that day to offend her mother-in-law. If so, it had been unintentional. But she had more important things to worry
about now, she told herself with a slight shrug.
Putting Donna and her problems out of her mind, she sat quietly in a chair beside Tyler’s bed, studying the numbers on the monitors and watching the heavily sedated child’s chest rise and fall in the steady rhythm of the ventilator.
Jackson sat in a chair next to Laurel’s, on the other side of the room from most of the equipment the staff needed easy access to. They sat without speaking for quite a while, both lost in their own thoughts, their eyes rarely leaving the bed or the monitors. They responded when anyone spoke to them, but neither initiated conversation.
Jackson finally seemed to rouse from his reverie. He glanced at Laurel. “He looks pretty good, don’t you think? Considering, I mean. His color’s good. Numbers look positive, from what I can tell on those monitors.”
He needed reassurance, and Laurel gave it to him, though she thought good was a poor choice of an adjective for the way their son looked at the moment. “He’s doing fine,” she said. “As soon as they can take him off this ventilator, I’m sure we’ll see a big improvement.”
“Just as well they’re keeping him sedated now, I guess. He’d be afraid if he woke up and couldn’t speak or pull that thing out of his throat. And I’m sure there’s going to be pain, even when they do bring him out of sedation.”
“Some pain, of course,” she agreed, trying to sound as calm as Jackson about the next steps. “But he’ll be given as much medication as he needs to control it.”
“We’ll make sure of that.”
Since neither Jackson nor Laurel were exactly the passive type when it came to their son’s medical care, neither of them accepting everything the medical professionals said or did without question, she didn’t doubt that Tyler would get the best care they could obtain for him. She was much more concerned with the time after they took him home from the hospital, when his care would be up to her. She still felt so much guilt that she had missed the early signs of his disability. What if she missed something else?
After another period of silence—at least, as quiet as a hospital unit filled with swooshing, beeping and whirring equipment could be—Jackson spoke again. “You know that couple we saw downstairs in the cafeteria? The ones who adopted the kid with the vision disabilities?”
“You mean the Hulsizers?”
“Yeah. They sure think the world of you.”
“They’re nice people. I like them, too.”
“That was a good thing you did for them, helping them find their son. They looked like good parents for him, a happy family.”
Though she was a little surprised by his topic, she nodded. “They’re very good parents. I knew they would be when I met them and spent some time with them.”
“They made it sound as if they wouldn’t have gotten a kid at all if you hadn’t fought for them.”